Ben Miller

Ben Miller is a Montana-based painter best known for his Endangered River series. He received a BFA in art from Washington State University in Seattle and spent 12 years teaching art before moving to Bozeman, Montana in 2016. He has spent the past seven years painting the endangered western rivers of Montana, Washington, Colorado and Wyoming, and more recently the rivers of Chicago, New Jersey, New York, and Miami.

Miller began his Endangered Rivers series out of his deep passion for raising the awareness and importance of river preservation. The Endangered Rivers paintings, like the rivers themselves, are complex layers of color and transparency. Each work is created by thousands of singular casts with a fly rod – Miller calls this process Fly Cast Painting and calls the various shaped materials on the end of the rod Fly Brushes. In a sense, the paintings are made in reverse, with marks made on the back of a plexiglass panel. When turned around, the first strikes of paint represent surface reflections and whitewater rills. These highlights are then backed by successive color layers of deeper and darker forms. While his preparation is calculated, the execution must be spontaneous. He must first find the right spot, then read the river and the day. Miller’s stated goal for these works is to mark down the truth of a river, not something he thinks it should be. 

In this sense, Miller’s paintings are not abstractions but a collection of moments that reflect the onrushing life of things in constant, and constantly varied, collision - a complex snapshot of one place on a particular day. Miller’s Endangered Rivers expresses the idea that small parts of the world can hold our deepest attention, and looking closely offers great rewards.

While pursuing this passion, he met Gary Snyder, a New York gallerist who’s been instrumental in the discovery of many notable artists. This led to a recent film collaboration, a documentary short, of which Miller is the subject, directed by Manabu Inada and titled The Rhythms of the River. Through this film, Miller came to the attention of the Japanese fashion brand South2 West8 who launched a clothing line collaboration inspired by his artwork. 

Miller exhibited at Story Mill Pop-Up Gallery in Bozeman, Montana the summers of 2020 and 2021. He showed at Two Rivers Gallery in Big Timber, Montana in 2021. In 2022 he was one of 16 international artists selected to participate in Expo Chicago’s PROFILE. In the fall of 2022 he was given a four day residency at MANA Contemporary in Jersey City, NJ where he painted three paintings of the Hackensack and Hudson Rivers which were then exhibited at MANA. Miller exhibited again at ExpoChicago in 2023 and painted Lake Michigan from the Navy Pier. In 2024 he was the featured artist at both the Hamptons Fine Art Fair and Art Miami.

Over the last five years Miller has partnered with environmental organizations such as and Hackensack River Keepers, Gallatin River Task Force, Save Wild Trout, the Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Chicago River and Pelican Harbor Seabird Station to raise awareness and funds for river preservation.